…the stills & prose of our family days.

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…where a brave and beautiful bunch gather every week to find out what comes out when we all spend five minutes writing on the same topic and then sharing ‘em over here.

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I look down at my phone just as the digits turn to the 7 minute mark. The grin that starts to spread across my cheeks so wide and bright, it actually hurts. The grin hurts. Not my feet, my legs, my 3-times-a-momma-belly or butt. I can do this. I can run. Kicking up a pile of yellow leaves from a puddle as I turn and dart across the street I make my way back past the charming North Main houses I have been running by for the past 5 weeks.

I’m 40 now. I’m not getting any younger. Or thinner. Or fitter. Or more energized. I eat my vegetables. I drink my water and take my medication. I go to work and pay my bills. I can take care of this body of mine so that I live a long life full of the privilege of cuddling the grandchildren I one day long to have and hold. It’s not about me.

And yet it is.

I wasn’t a strong swimmer. I had to take the Red Cross swim classes more than one time to pass them in the town tunneled into the upper mitten of Michigan. I wasn’t an athletic gym student. I was the last one to come up the line of the mile run every Friday of high school gym class. As a post-college grad, my well-meaning and good-living Midwestern friends were so clever to kidnap me and pay the fee so that I would be on the soccer team they loved. Each week, pulling into the parking lot of the Big Bend studio in St. Louis, I was always huffing and puffing, ever in a hurry, to settle in and relax through my yoga class at the end of the day, despite my redundant promises to be better prepared next time

I’m not competitive. I‘ve never looked forward to sweating.

But now…

That grin was the second I’ve experienced in this past month. It brought back the squeal of excitement as I raced across the first grade school playground jumping effortlessly onto the merry-go-round joining the schoolgirl chant, “Boys push! Boys push!” The exhilaration as my hands smoothed over the ancient metal bars on the third grade playground as my friends and I wound around them in penny-drop after penny-drop. The smell and feel of the wind streaming my brown locks out behind me as I pumped the pedals of my bicycle across town to the pool each summer afternoon. That wild and free feeling of enjoying my own momentum. My own ability to fly. To be fully present in the years of my own children’s swift growth, that’s what I want to own once again. That’s what I’m after. That’s why I want to fly. That’s why I run.

Corner view is a weekly Wednesday gathering, originally hosted by Jane, now by Francesca. A topic is given and you can see impressions; be it photographic or writerly in form, from around the world. Come see the world’s corner view via the links on the sidebar!

…where a brave and beautiful bunch gather every week to find out what comes out when we all spend five minutes writing on the same topic and then sharing ‘em over here.

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“NOOOOOOOOO!!!!”

Her hand reached out and slapped mine with a quick reflex reaction to my own hands reaching out to turn off the TV. We had just gotten home from work and school and I wanted everyone in the tubby to wash off the mental anxiety brought in with cold and flu season. They know the routine. This has been an expectation for years now. But still. She has to push. She has to assert. She has to insist that she doesn’t HAVE to do what I want when I want it. In my own flash of anger I smacked back at her small hand as it struck mine a second time. The moment we touched each other I felt the bewilderment of what she was feeling wash over me. I stepped back turning the TV off as I went.

“To time-out. Now. Time to cool down.”

Her voice rose in protest as big tears leaked out of her sad eyes. Her anger had flared at me in the blink of an eye. Just 5 minutes earlier she had been leaping over the piles of oak leaves in our driveway as she chattered on about how she was chosen to run for president in her first grade classroom. The time change this past week, it means it is dark and they are tired when we pull up at home each weeknight. It means we feel an urgency to get in the house and hibernate with no obligations ahead of us for the night. It means we want to eat and read books and watch TV cuddled up together on the living room couch. The order we do that in though, well it matters to me. But pretty much only to me. I want us to come home and get done the things we have to get done before we do the things we want to do. The truth is- that’s all me. The truth is- I’m not as flexible about it as the girls would like. The truth is, I have reasons why I make us do things in the order I do each night. The truth is, those reasons don’t mean much to the independent and strong-willed seven-year-old I live with. She’s spent the day, the week, the month doing what her teachers ask. And at the end of the day spent apart from Momma, she doesn’t always want to hand those reigns of independence back over. She knows she’s capable of making her own good decisions.

This give and take as she grows, it’s hard on me just as much as it’s hard on her. How to not discuss Every. Single. Living. Thing. But how to discuss enough of the things so that she knows her opinions matter. How to teach her to respect others’ authority, while not just believing everything she hears. How to know truth when she hears it and tell it from the fiction that circles her world. How to talk and how to listen.

Our anger set the baby off. She ran to me to be picked up, only to then lean in and bite my shoulder in protest. Setting her down in a second time-out spot I turned to the Quail. She with her high emotional intelligence looked at me solemnly. “Zuzu angry. “ I nodded as her sign for angry shifted to a tracing of tears down her own dry cheeks. “Sug sad.” These weren’t questions. They were observations. Crossing my legs to sit down on the floor in front of her she leans over and wraps her arms around my neck. “My momma.”

My momma. Their momma. I hug her back and go to call the other two out of time out, turn on the water to the tub and begin again.

…where a brave and beautiful bunch gather every week to find out what comes out when we all spend five minutes writing on the same topic and then sharing ‘em over here.

Go:

“What did I do wrong?”

I had been sharp with her. Unnecessarily so. She hadn’t done anything wrong. I was just tired of not being listened to and had raised my voice in response to the cacophony of the little ones running away from, while simultaneously giggling at and ignoring my repeated requests. She had been sitting quietly on the couch watching Word Girl. It was almost bedtime for them and my head was filled with the swirling clutter of our kitchen, the undone daily to-do list, the mountain of unwashed laundry and the books and toys that the children seemed to see as a household obstacle course to be serpentined through rather than picked up after. She was sitting amidst the three ring circus of our living room and I wanted some help cleaning up.

She’s almost seven now. Light years from the toddler who used to grin with a carefree enthusiasm that was hard to pin down. She takes our words, our tones, our looks or lack of them into her tender heart and mirrors them back in her daily interactions with others. I hear it as she scolds her dolls and reminds her friends and sisters of the rules and how to act in both their very real and make-believe-land and I frown making a mental note to temper myself. To give her more emotional freedom to remain the unencumbered little girl that darts between big-sister-hood and little-girl-dom on a whim. Who frequently entwines her unending mommalogues with requests to be the baby next lifetime around with predictions that when she grows up she’ll be not only a teacher but the person in charge of them.

She.

She’s not a baby anymore. Not a toddler or a preschooler to be shaped and shepherded at every turn of the schedule and activity. She is venturing out into her school and her community and becoming not just the person I expect her to be, but the girl she wants to be. A girl who matches her striped shirt with rainbow polka-dotted jeggings because she likes the way the patterns play together. A girl who wants to sing Katy Perry loudly in the car with the windows rolled down rather than listening to me sing another verse of the unending family version of the Barney song. A girl who loves to both get a smiley face on her weekly spelling test and ask in baby tones if I’ll carry her to bed tonight. A girl who wants to be the one to choose which restaurant we go to for dinner but will still only eat cheese quesadillas and mini-corndogs most nights. A girl who begs me to not take her picture in front of her friends but photobombs the shots of her sleeping sisters.

Corner view is a weekly Wednesday gathering, originally hosted by Jane, now by Francesca. A topic is given and you can see impressions; be it photographic or writerly in form, from around the world. Come see the world’s corner view via the links on the sidebar!

There were flowers. There were pancakes. There was brunch with local fare.

And yet- there was not a single hour where I didn’t haul out my stern momma voice. There were tears, bleeding, complaining, whining, arguing and naps that were too short. There were chores undone and big deals made of the chores that were done on the heals of much too much nagging. There was a portrait drawn of me with a note that the six year old wishes she could give me time to myself. And there is the cringing mother wishing the kindergarten teacher hadn’t had the frown of reading that. Then there is the six year old in all her exuberance bursting into teary flames after she manages to rip my card clear in half in her desire to “help” me open it. The next morning that same six year old informed me that I wasn’t lame because I didn’t get to market to buy more of her breakfast cereal- after all- we had had a busy mother’s day where she “had to clean the entire house by 7:30pm”. Ahem. So yes, it could have gone better. I could have been kinder. I could have lowered what I already thought were pretty low expectations. God willing we’ll get a chance to do it all again next year. After all- that day right there- that’s the stuff isn’t it? That’s the stuff of motherhood.

Corner view is a weekly Wednesday gathering, originally hosted by Jane, now by Francesca. A topic is given and you can see impressions; be it photographic or writerly in form, from around the world. Come see the world’s corner view via the links on the sidebar!

On my birthday I knew what I wanted to do. As a Midwestern girl by birth, living my adulthood in the South, with a winter birthday, the flowers I would celebrate with were always purchased ones. This year, turning 40, I wanted to embrace my acquired Southerness and capture the beauty that Mother Nature offers up on my day. Once the children were down for their midday nap, I told Lovey I was heading over to the local Botanical Gardens to snap some pictures of what was in bloom. I grabbed my camera, the baby and my purse and opened the screen door to find….snow. As a Southern girl from the midwest- I hadn’t been treated to snow on my birthday in many, many years, and yes- living in the South- snow any day is a treat. Just ask Zuzu. Two years ago it snowed on Christmas which reportedly had not happened in this area in over one to two hundred years. The snowy clouds were light in our area but offered the lovely overcast that is just right for capturing the beauty around us. My birthday bouquet: